Beverly Sills, All-American Diva With Brooklyn Roots, Is Dead at 78

Published: July 4, 2007

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Because Morris Silverman worked on commission, the family's income fluctuated wildly, and they moved often. The first apartment Ms. Sills recalled living in was a one-bedroom flat where she shared the bedroom with her parents while her older brothers, Sidney and Stanley, slept on a Hide-a-Bed in the foyer.

Shirley Silverman was an unabashed stage mother who thought her talented little girl with the golden curls could become a Jewish Shirley Temple. So with the stage name Bubbles, Ms. Sills was pushed into radio work. At 4 she made her debut on a Saturday morning children's show called ''Uncle Bob's Rainbow House,'' quickly becoming a weekly fixture on the show. At 7 she graduated to the ''Major Bowes Capital Family Hour,'' on which she tap-danced and sang coloratura arias that she had learned phonetically from her mother's Amelita Galli-Curci records. She won a role on a radio soap opera, ''Our Gal Sunday,'' where for 36 episodes she portrayed a ''nightingirl of the mountains.''

But her father put an end to her child-star career when she was 12 so that she could concentrate on her education at Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn and the Professional Children's School in Manhattan. She devoted herself to her voice lessons with Estelle Liebling, which had begun when Ms. Sills was just 9. Liebling had coached Galli-Curci and was Ms. Sills's only vocal teacher.

When Ms. Sills graduated from the professional school in 1945, at 16, she began 10 years of grinding work, including long stints with touring opera companies, performing Gilbert and Sullivan operettas and, later, leading roles like Violetta in Verdi's ''Traviata.'' Recounting these tours for a Newsweek interview in 1969, she said, ''I had my first high heels, my first updo hair style, my first strapless dress, and I didn't know what to hold up first.''

City Opera Debut

In 1955, after seven previous unsuccessful auditions over a three-year period, Ms. Sills was accepted into the New York City Opera. Her debut as Rosalinde in ''Die Fledermaus'' was enthusiastically received by critics.

On tour with the City Opera in Cleveland in 1955, Ms. Sills met Peter B. Greenough, a Boston Brahmin descendant of John Alden, whose family holdings included The Plain Dealer of Cleveland. With a degree from Harvard and a master's degree from the Columbia School of Journalism, Mr. Greenough was then an associate editor at The Plain Dealer. When he met Ms. Sills, he was going through a difficult divorce. Eight weeks after it was made final, he married Ms. Sills in a small civil ceremony at Liebling's New York studio.

Suddenly Ms. Sills found herself the stepmother to three daughters and the mistress of a 23-room house in Cleveland. She hated the city, as she acknowledged in ''Beverly: An Autobiography,'' her blunt 1987 memoir: ''Peter was ostracized by Cleveland's rinky-dink version of high society because he had the nerve to fight for custody of his children.''

During this period Ms. Sills regularly commuted to New York to perform with the City Opera, which was experiencing hard times. The problems came to a head in 1956 when the conductor Joseph Rosenstock, the company's general director, resigned. Ms. Sills was one of a core group of singers who met with board members to find a way to save it. This led to the appointment of the pragmatic, take-charge conductor Julius Rudel, who spearheaded a revival, as general director in 1957.

In 1959 Ms. Sills gave birth to a daughter, Meredith Holden Greenough. Two years later she gave birth to the couple's second child, a son, Peter Bulkeley Greenough Jr. At the time Meredith, called Muffy, was 22 months old but unable to speak. Tests revealed that she had a profound loss of hearing.

Just as Ms. Sills and her husband were absorbing their daughter's deafness, it became clear that their son, called Bucky, now 6 months old, was significantly mentally retarded, with additional complications that eluded diagnosis. ''They knew nothing about autism then,'' Ms. Sills later wrote.

With support, their daughter thrived over time. But the boy's problems were severe, and he was eventually placed in an institution.

The diagnoses of her children's disabilities had come within a six-week period. For months thereafter, Ms. Sills turned down all singing engagements to be at home. Mr. Rudel, convinced that going back to work would help her cope, sent lighthearted letters addressed to ''Dear Bubbala,'' suggesting absurd roles for her to sing, like Boris Godunov, and sharing opera gossip. He then tried to insist that Ms. Sills had a contract to fulfill. When she reported for work, she felt like a totally different artist.

''I was always a good singer,'' she said in the Newsweek interview, ''but I was a combination of everyone else's ideas: the director, the conductor, the tenor. After I came back, I talked back. I stopped caring what anyone else thought.'' But she managed to rid herself of bitterness.

''I felt if I could survive my grief, I could survive anything,'' she said. ''Onstage I was uninhibited, and I began to have a good time.''